E 687 
.B97 
Copy 1 



PRINTED BY REQUEST, FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION. 



AN ADDRESS 



In Memory of 



U 



AMES A. Garfield, 



Ute President or the United States, 



NATHANIEL J. BURTON, 



Pastor of Park Church, Hartford, Conn., 



Sept. 25, 1881. 



PRINTED BY REQUEST, FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION. 



AN ADDRESS 



In Memory of 



U 



AMES A, Garfield, 



Late President of the United States, 



BY 



NATHANIEL J. BURTON, 



Pastor of Park Church, Hartford, Conn. 



Sept. 25, 1881 



HARTFORD: 

Press of The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co., 

188 1. 



^'p 






ADDRESS 



It is impossible to add aiiglit to that unprecedented 
outpouring and testimony wliich day after day lias filled 
the daily journals of this country and the world in re- 
gard to President Garfield, his life and his death. And 
yet it does not seem possible, even if it were fitting, to 
let this holy day pass, and our worship go on, without 
some further remembrance of him, and some further 
observations upon that great event which we all so de- 
plore. Will you give me your attention then for a few 
moments while I recount some things which tend to 
make this very sorrowful loss of ours not wholly intoler- 
able to our hearts. 

I. It is enough to fill us with a deep and solemn joy 
that our President was ready to go, as having long been 
established in the Christian faith, and long accustomed 
to carry the burdens and meet the ills of life, in the 
strength of Him who is all things for evermore unto his 
beloved. He was born into a family steadfast in God. 
He was piously and diligently taught from the first. 
He went forth to his first tasks with the faith of his 
mother strong in him. He consecrated himself to the 
service of his country in war, not only as a patriot but 
as a Christian. He trusted in the Lord God of hosts in 
all the perils of battle. He returned to civil life, and 
legislative service, on principle. And all through his 
long public career he kept himself personally pure, de- 
fended this and that in God's name, drew close to God 
in prayer and frequent worship, and commended himself 



unto all lueu as a disciple of tlie Lord Jesus Christ. 
Therefore it was to be expected that he would come up 
to death with an inspired courage, as he did, and would 
leave the millions who mourn for him to rejoice them- 
selves in a thankfulness which words cannot express. 
He sleeps in Jesus, blessed sleep. 

11. I remind you too that although at first his death 
seems untimel}-, because he was not yet old, and be- 
cause his children were yet young, and because he 
seemed to be on the eve of doing more for his country 
than he had ever done, nevertheless he had, in fact, 
rounded out an uncommonly full life; a life indeed so 
complete in great services that any of us would be more 
than satisfied if we could work out one like it. There 
was no time lost in his fifty years. In his very child- 
hood he beo-an his tasks, and from that time on till his 
breath ceased in death his hand and head and heart 
were busy and his manly earnestness never flagged. 
After some years of hard manual labor, and after some 
suitable preparation for it, he became a teacher, than 
which no vocation more draws on a man's powers, more 
inspires a true and good heart, or more tells on the wel- 
fare of the world. And, according to all accounts, what 
his hands found to do in that pursuit he did with his 
might, and in a conscience void of offence towards God 
and man. 

Then, later, in 1861, he with characteristic zeal and 
devotion, responded to the first call of his country for 
men to put down rebellion, and on that new field, by 
universal consent, he carried himself with an ability, and 
a self-forgetfulness, and a success, very honorable to him- 
self and beneficial to his country. Already he had ar- 
rived at a point where it could hardly have been called 
untimely had lie died. 



But liis most serviceable mid brilliant years were still 
before liim, for now he enters tlie national congress and 
for eighteen years on that conspicuous floor, and at one 
of the most important periods of our history, he stood 
in the front rank of debaters and parliamentarians, up- 
' holding the great principles in behalf of which the great 
war had been fought through, assisting to lay anew 
the foundations of the republic, and furnishing to 
the political student and the statesman of coming- 
years a body of speeches, arguments, and orations, on 
matters fundamental to the public welfare, as vigorous 
and massive, as high-minded, and as true to the la^vs of 
God, as anything of the kind in all our later history. 

A powerful orator on the field of civil debate and in 
perilous times, a man of presence and courage and great- 
heartedness, and of ingrained and incorruptible high 
principle, is one of the finest figures on earth, and Mr. 
Garfield could have afforded to rest from his labors if 
he had left only his parliamentary renown to speak for 
him unto succeeding times. 

III. But I do not know but the man has accom- 
plished as much in his dying as ever he did by his 
living — though it should be said that his dying would 
have been a comparatively futile event, had he not al- 
ready greatly commended himself to his people by the 
solid and even resplendent services of his life. Many 
o-ood men and saints of God passed away on that sad 
September IDtli, which saw him go, but the world at 
large did not even know who they were, and could only 
think of his going; and the reason for that was (in large 
part) that his life had been filled with works well-done 
that bore directly and visibly upon the interests of this 
entire nation, and therefore of all mankind. 

But many a man of great services has not been so for- 



6 

tunate as our President was iu workini!: i»:reat results 
upon his bed of death. 

Just note how that matter stands. 

In the first phice, those openinii's of domestic h)ve 
which have come to the observation of mankind during 
our long and terrible days of waiting and watching ]jy 
his bedside, have been a very gospel to the universal 
heart of man. The pathos of it has been something 
utterly irresistible. Gen. Garfield's early home life, his 
affectionate laborious mother, his older brothers sacrifi- 
cing themselves for him the little one, his first contril)u- 
tions to the comfort of the family when he grew to be 
old enough to do anything, his marriage to the girl whom 
he had taught in his school, his devotion to her, and hers 
to him, during all the days of their early hard pulling 
together, his instinctive recognition of her, and of tlie 
uK^ther w^ho bore him, in that kiss of mingled memory 
and affection, so much commented upon, which he gave 
them when he had taken the Presidential oath and stood 
at last on one of the a^\^ful summits of the world; all 
these home-bred realities which have been gradually dis- 
closed are a benediction I say and an education to all 
human-hearted persons even unto the ends of the earth. 
And then, to crown all, how during these last eighty 
days of trial the name and form of Lucretia Garfield 
have gradually come into the foreground ; the woman, 
gentle, strong, and faithful ; and how the kings of the 
earth, and the statesmen, magistrates, and parliaments, of 
the whole civilized world have saluted from afar that 
gentle form, and have rained their benedictions upon her 
head, she meanwhile pursuing her daily way and bearing 
her daily dreadful burden in a quietness that was sublime, 
the quietness of a life-long love for him who was fading 
away before her eyes, and of a life-long trust in his God 



and hers. I do not know tliat ever in tlie history of the 
world has a woman been set uj^on just such an eminence, 
and in the blaze of it has carried herself in such absolute 
modesty, sweetness, and strength. 

I repeat ; it is to be mentioned among the felicities of 
General Garfield's career, and as one of his final services 
to mankind, that he and his in the providence of God 
have stood before the world in a domestic picture most 
edifying to contemplate. It is one star in his diadem of 
stars that his domestic life would bear the world-wide 
publicity to which it has been exposed. 

Another work which he has wrought in his dying, as 
he was not able to do in his active life, is this : he has 
exhibited the highest qualities of the human soul under 
a pressure to which not many are ever subjected, and in 
thus doing he has delivered a lesson and an exhortation 
to us all. Behold what patience there was in him, what 
equanimity under the terrible fluctuations of his case, 
what consideration for those about him, what courao-e to 
the very last, w^hat steadfast silent refusal to load those 
whom he loved with any anxiety or foreboding of his 
own, if he had any. Of course these special, fine, attri- 
butes were in him long before, and had a good deal of 
exercise doubtless in his years of war, and in his many 
struggles of debate and legislation; but they came to 
their utmost in his long final contest with death ; and 
besides they were displayed on a vastly more public 
theatre than ever before, and under circumstances im- 
pressive beyond all parallel. What a preacher of the 
best things of character he was, and is. 

I but put forth a variation of the same theme when I 
add that in his long dying he did a matchless service in 
whelming all sections and classes in this country in a 
common noble and tender feeling, and melting all nations 



8 

into sucli a unity of the heart as was never known. A 
few years since, we had not those wondei"ful methods of 
swift intercommunication which we now have, so tliat a 
world-wide solidarity of feeling, such as we have seen of 
late, was impossible. It took weeks to get a message to 
England, and months to reach the outmost nations ; but 
now the stroke of General Garfield's pulse at any given 
moment, was simultaneously observed by the entire cir- 
cle of the populations of the globe — and this sense in all 
men's minds that they were sitting together, at the same 
moment, over the same sufferer, watching the swell and 
ebb of his life, greatly assisted their interflow of emotion, 
and unified them in a manner truly wonderful. And 
certainly that is a good thing. We, the nations, are 
divided from each other by long intervals of sea and 
land ; by diverse blood and training and history, by the 
memory of old wars in some instances, and by a general 
inability to see eye to eye on a thousand things. But 
these many tones of dissonance were all drowned in one 
mighty melody of peace and love around the couch of our 
suffering President ; and from no land among all lands 
ha\^e we received expressions more heart-melting than from 
our enemy of years ago — Great Britain — whose Queen, 
overriding the conventionalities of royalty, and grounding 
herself on her womanhood and her recollection of her own 
sorrows, has put herself heart to heart with Mrs. Garfield, 
and with our whole people, in despatch after despatch 
from her own hand ; has ordered her court into mourn- 
ing, and by a command to her ambassador at Washing- 
ton, has placed \iy>oti the President's bier a wreath with 
these words : — " Queen Victoria, to the memory of the 
late President Garfield — an expression of her sorrow and 
sympathy with Mrs. Garfield and the American Nation, 
Sept. 22, 1881." I think that the American people will 



9 

be ready now as never before to subscribe tbeir amen to 
the words of the Poet Laureate of Eno-land, wlien lie 
said and sung years ago, addressing his Queen : 

"May you rule us long, 
And leave us rulers of your blood, 
As noble till the latest day; 
May children of our children say, 
' She wrought her people lasting good.' 

Her court was pure, her life serene, 

God gave her peace, her land reposed; ' 

A thousand claims to reverence closed, 

In her as Mother, Wife and Queen. 

And statesmen at her council met. 
Who knew the seasons when to take 
Occasion by the hand and make. 
The bounds of freedom wider yet, 

By shaping some august decree, 
Which kept her throne unshaken still, 
Broad-based upon her people's will. 
And compassed by the inviolate sea." 

Men and brethren, in this unity of peoples and king- 
doms, l:>rought about of late by our anxiety and woe, 
you have an illustration of what is permanently possible, 
yes, of what shall actually be, in the golden age of the 
world, when 

" No more shall nation against nation rise, 
Nor ardent warriors meet with hateful eyes, 
Nor fields with gleaming steel be covered o'er, 
The brazen trumpets kindle rage no more ; 
But useless lances into scythes shall bend, 
And the broad faulchion in a ploughshare end." 

Another victory of our dying President, and another 
universal service to right thinking and right feeling, is 
the demonstration furnished in his case that the radical- 
ism of those who say, " One man is as good as another," 

2 



10 

meauiiig thereby tliat a man is to Ije taken for what lie 
personally is, and is to liave no esteem or deference on 
account of any official standing lie may liave, is wrong 
and cannot be vindicated. We, in this country, (many 
of us,) have often ridiculed the homage paid to kings and 
queens and other grand officials in the old lands over the 
sea, especially in instances where those grandees have 
been in themselves insignificaut, and even contemptible. 
But the truth is, the person w^ho happens to be the sovei'- 
eign of England (for example,) at any given time, be that 
person man or woman, wise or foolish, moral or immoral, 
has two great distinctions which entitle him, (or her) to 
unusual deference. First (to use the very language of 
St. Paul on this subject), " He is the minister of God," 
— " for there is no power but of God, — the powers that 
be are ordained of God " — "for this cause pay ye tribute 
also, for they are God's ministers." Therefore when 
Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, in 1776, that, "all governments derive their just 
po^ver from the consent of the governed," he did not cover 
the whole truth on that subject. He did not bring in 
St. Paul's idea at all. It was natural that a man of his 
religious views should not. Moreover it was natural that 
all our people in that day should tend to lose sight of the 
divine side of human government, and dwell altogether 
on the people as the source of power and authority, 
because they were just then falling back on the extreme 
right of revolution against their oppressive King, — 
George the Fourth of England — wdio had lost his divine 
right to be their monarch if he ever had any, they would 
all say. As time went on, and our national experience 
was enlarged in several great crises, (notably in the war of 
the Reljellion in 1861,) men began to recover that lost 
doctrine of JhiJers the Minixti^rs of God — and our whole 



11 

onset on tlie insurrectionary Southern people was just n 
o-io-antic statement of tliat doctrine, as ag-ainst their Jeffer- 
sonian notion that no government has any anth(^rity a 
moment longer than the people like. We have shed the 
blood of myriads of men and have expended money by 
the billion, to establish St. Paul's assertion, and prove 
that a civil ruler is more than that same man would be 
as a private citizen, and is entitled to more consideration. 

And now in these last days the same ti'utli has been 
announced in another way — viz.: in the honor, at once 
magnificent and tender, whicli has been accorded to Gen, 
Garfield, with a spontaneity and a whole-heartedness 
which was universal. It was because he was the 
anointed of God (that in part) that the best surgeons 
the land could afford stood o-uard at his bedside, that in- 
numerable letters of love and good cheer were poured 
in upon him, that every Sabbath service in the land made 
mention of his case before God, that every day at mil- 
lions of family altars petitions were sent up, that other 
lands hailed him and blessed him in continual telegrams, 
that railway companies stood ready to carry him whither- 
soever he would, ministering to his weakness by their 
utmost skill, as though they were carrying an angel, 
and, now that he is dead, it is because God's ministei- 
is dead that the bells are tolled all round the world. 

I said that as over against that radicalism whicli says 
one man is as good as another, the fact is, every ruler 
has two distinctions which make it fitting he should be 
revered. The first distinction I have mentioned. He is 
the vice-regent of the Most-High. And the second is 
that in him is embodied and symbolically set forth, 
everything that makes the nation over which he presides 
to be a nation. The American people are fifty millions 
strong, and Gen. Garfield in his own person was those 



12 

niillioiis. We all headed up in him. So Ave felt and so 
it was. When he was shot, we were shot. When the 
Pennsylvania Railway Company took him up tenderly in 
its arms, him and his whole houseliold, and Hed with him 
as on wings to the healing airs of the sea, hushing all 
along the way the thunder of their countless trains, and 
rolling into Long Branch with their precious burden like 
armies coming liome from victory, every man of us felt 
that he himself had received a personal attention from 
that great corporation. Great is the power of syml)ols 
and symbolic persons. Kemember what the Hag was to 
us in 1861, when it was attacked. In ordinary times it 
swings from its staff a beautiful object and sufficiently 
dear, but in times of national peril, by a grand move- 
ment of the imagination the people flock to it, and set 
their eyes upon it, and glorify it beyond all poAver of ex- 
pression; because it is natural in great excitements to 
sum up all that we think and all that we feel in synd3ols 
that are compact and vivid, and continually visible. So 
the army can the better push into the battle Avith that in 
sight. So the dying soldier can the more calmly die 
when that ^vaves before him. So the legislator can the 
more devotedl}" act for his country's good, when in the 
air over the hall where he sits floats that emblem of 
nationality. 

In the case of the flag our enthusiasm is aroused by a 
symbol pure and simple — that is, the flag in itself is 
nothing, all its. interest is symbolical — in the case of a 
symbolic person, as our President, there are three inter- 
ests combined ; first, the man ; secondly, the man as 
God's agent ; and thirdly, the man as the representative 
of our nationality. And if the man in himself is strong, 
good, and attractive (that first), — and if the man has 
been duly chosen, so that he is God's minister and our 



13 

representative indeed (that second), then all conceivable 
forces of influence are met in him, and there is no end to 
the delight with which his people look upon liim, no end 
to their indignation when he is insulted, or their gratifi- 
cation when he is respected, i^o end to their soitow when 
he suffers, their mourning when he dies, and their tear- 
ful thankfulness when the nations of the earth uncover 
their heads about his bier, and lift up their dirges and 
the lamentations of their bells over his grave. 

Thank God, that the essentially representative charac- 
ter of a ruler has again been mightily declared, — his 
character as representing God, and his character as the 
personification of his nation, — and thank God that Mr. 
Garfield was such a kind of man, so able, noble, and 
good, that when we come to pay him the official honors 
that belong to him, we are not filled with any reluc- 
tances as though Garfield the man was less and meaner 
than Garfield the magistrate, but contrariwise, we gather 
about him with the entire afifirmation of our judgment 
and conscience, ahd the entire homage of our liearts. 

And now, one other point, wherein he did a special 
great work in his last days, and made his bed of death 
more a throne than his chair of office could ever be. 

In the first place, his protracted disability, with its 
intense fluctuations of hope and fear, has brought this 
nation to their knees, with remarkable unanimity and 
earnestness ; and has notified them of theii* own instinc- 
tive and ineradicable confidence that there is a God, and 
a personal God, and a God who desires to be entreated 
by his creatures. In prosperous times it is easy to con- 
ceive doubts and bring forth many vaporings of argument 
to the effect that as likely as not there is not any God, or 
if there is, that he cannot certainly be found out, or if he 
can be found out, that it is of no use to urge him to do 



14 

this or that, his miud having Ijeeii made ii[) from all 
eternity, and his plans laid out. But in the stress of dis- 
aster the soul is apt to settle back upon its inevitable 
knowledge, its primary affirmatives which, as often as any 
way, lie below its ordinary, easy observation, (just as in 
dying, not unfrequently, tlie memory calls up numerous 
things which had not been thought of since childhood, 
and which would have been supposed to have lapsed 
from the mind forever) — ^and so, in the twinkling of an 
eye, you shall see the forty atheistic surmises that may 
have half undermined the faith of a great people ex- 
ploded as by the seven thunders of G(m1 ; and down up- 
on their knees they go, and the sky resounds with their 
outcries. Not every one of their out-cryings has in it 
all the elements of prayer, nevertheless it is good that 
God is thus practically acknowledged; and what a work 
he has accomplished, who in prostration and feebleness, 
yea. and by force of that very feebleness, has thus con- 
strained and solemnized and bowed do^vn a whole na- 
tion. 

But it turns out that this wrestling unanimity of peti- 
tion has been resolutely negatived by the Most High — 
in which I notice two things. First, a most impressive 
self-assertion, and awful sovereignty, on his part ; and 
secondly, a special challenge to our faith. I cannot well 
describe my sense of the majesty of God as made known 
in this his recent refusal of the desire of his people. 
( ) ! that monarchial will ! AVhicli is by no means a cold 
will though, but a warm one. It is not likely that he 
^vho created Mr. Garfield, and redeemed him, and brought 
him into the Kingdom of his grace, would withhold from 
him any good thing out of sheer cold-heartedness. No, 
that enthroned Avill, before which all creatures are as 
insects in the shadow of Mt. Blanc, is as suffused with 



15 

e\'eiy conceivable genicality as that same white and holy 
Swiss Mountain is, when the descending sun has laid up- 
on it its tinges and l)luslies and heavenly afterglows. 
In so far as God's will is resolute and will not bend, at 
this or that point ^vhere we think we would like it to 
bend, the explanation nuist be that he sees all things 
in tlieir relations and the end from the beginning, and is 
committed by the whole stress of his love to safeguard 
all welfares ; so that, that absolutism of his which rejects 
a nation's prayer is just his all-including tenderness do- 
ing its proper work. It would be a dreadful state of 
things if people, by massing themselves and prolonging 
their urgencies, could get in upon the feeling of God in 
a ^vay to mjdce him forget his wisdom for the moment, 
and his obligations of affection to other peoples and in- 
terests, and bestow a gift as when an inconsiderate 
mother unable to i-esist a teasins; child, ijrants unto him 
that ^vhich eventually destroys his life. 

The subject of prayer, its answers and refusals, is one 
too large to be treated just here ; so that all I can undei'- 
take to say for the present is, that in God's denial of us 
of late, we have an inconceivably robust notice served on 
us of his fatherly absolutism ; and a call also to trust him 
perfectly because although absolute he is fatherly. We 
have it for our special privilege just now to walk by 
faith. Plainly we cannot walk by sight. If our Presi- 
dent had been spared in concession to our agony we 
should have had a touch of sight, (such as God often 
grants,) but as it is, there is nothing left for us but to 
rest in faith — unless indeed we choose to let our grief run 
away with us, and land us in Atheism. And Atheism is 
not sight but rather everything negative, and dark, and 
distressing. 

For my part, I have taken pains years ago, to look this 



16 

matter of j^i'ayer tlirougli, in so far as one can — and the 
result is that the removal of our dear President when all 
mankind wanted him and prayed for him, not merely does 
not be^v^ilder my hold on God, but sends me to him in a 
new devotion. Yes, it is a solemn exhilaration to observe 
that august fortitude with which he adheres to the best, 
even though for the time being he may seem inclement 
to the suffering creatures and multitudes who throng to 
his feet. You are safe, and I am safe, and all things are 
safe, under the shelter of an administration which is 
braced and buttressed by such integrities. 

And as to prayers, why put them in none the less be- 
cause of these invincibilities in God, because he has told 
us to, and because many a blessing is secured by prayer, 
(even- visibly sometimes,) and because God's I'efusals 
are rich in glorious results, precisely as the wealth of 
many a man is the result of self-denials inculcated and 
forced upon him by his father when he was young and 
more full of wishes and loncriuo-s than of wisdom. 

Brethren, I have now thrown upon one of the gloom- 
iest and most heart-breakino- events of the nineteenth 
century, t^vo or three sweet ci'osslights of comfort, and 
whereinsoever the death of this much admired and be- 
loved man still seems gloomy to your sympathetic and 
disappointed . feeling, I pray that you will try to rest 
in faith, 23atiently waiting for that sure day when God's 
full explanations shall pour in, and every darkness of his 
earthly providence shall seem to shine before our adoring 
eyes ^vith an absolute refulgence, even the refulgence of 
his perfect love. 



1 TRRftRV OF CONGRESS 

■ill 

009 088 238 If 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
II 11 11 II 



009 088 238 7 



PHOTOFSLE ENVELOPES 

MADE FROM 

PERMAUFE^ PAPER 

COPYRITE HOWARD PAPER MILLS INC. 
MIN pH 7.5 



